Archive for the ‘superstition’ Category

American God Is Also the One Roman Emperors Invented, For the Same Awful Reasons Which In US America Festered:

As US America is the mentally leading nation it matters to all what the USA thinks (yes, there are five times more Chinese, and soon, Indians, and Europe has thrice the population; however US institutions dominate world institutions… and it’s more than a habit; as I said, it’s instituted and people are “cool” with it, worldwide… Because they tend to distrust their neighbour more than the USA… Maybe Russia went back to disastrous, Putin friendly Orthodox Christianism, precisely because the USA’s propaganda was impelling the notion that Christ was “cool”, the indispensable and easiest way to gain respect…).

The more stupid one is metaphysically, the less developed in all other ways one tends to be.

FEW rich nations are as God-fearing as America. A global poll by Gallup in 2009 found that 69% of the country’s adults consider religion an important part of their daily life, more than twice the share in Britain, France or Japan. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre shows that young Americans, though less devout than their elders, are still much more so than their peers in Europe.

Five-sixths of those aged 18 to 29 believe in some kind of deity, but their generation is the least likely to worship God as described in the Bible (43%). This is not because they have switched en masse to another mainstream religion: only 8% of them follow non-Christian faiths, just slightly above the national average of 6%. Rather, a large share of young people profess to believe in another higher power (39%), whatever that may mean.

God, as young Americans see her, is a bit less likely to be all-knowing and all-powerful than the God their parents worship. However, compared with their elders, young people see God as less likely to protect them and more likely to punish them. Alas, there are no historical data to reveal whether youngsters have always felt so cursed—or if the current crop are experiencing an unusual amount of divine persecution.”

It is easier to believe in the Biblical or Islamist God, than to gather the motivation to learn history and geography… or just to acquire a sophisticated common sense. Instead, the common sense of the ambient rabble fits all, is ready to wear, and indispensable to arrivistes. This is why US common sense arrives so well, all over.

Also the US god, was, originally, not that of North America, but the plain old God of Europe, the God which presided over the destruction of Greco-Roman civilization. Believing in a God made in the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing masters of the Roman empire, who imposed and engineered Christianism, is highly compatible with The Empire, having been devised by those at the helm of The Empire.

Embracing Constantine’s terror god shows to all others that one respects authority, one is anxious to please it, and Constantine, and today’s replacement of Constantine, and one is endowed with proper naivety and anxiety to fit among one’s peers, and have a beautiful career. This is also why so many politicians in the West, including the revered Obama told us Islam was a religion of peace and Angelina Jolie, a movie star and UN ambassador tried to imprint on us, sotto voce, that “Islam is a beautiful religion“. (The rest of Jolie’s speech was commendable, of course, and indeed, that’s how manipulative politicians do it; at least since Adolf Hitler… Dilute lethal venom, in an appealing drink.)

India is on the left…

These properties, the awe for plutocrats, wealth, fate, and the vengeful, jealous common deity, enable those immigrants or descendants of rather recent immigrants who constitute most of the US citizenry to fit with each other, a common way to empathy.

The problem is all this indeed, sets the same sort of mood which presided over the fall of the Roman empire, and one can expect the same results. Believing in the vengeful, all-everything Lord sets a belief in vengeance and justice in another world, not in the one at hand…. meanwhile, obey the boss! Faith in the Christo-Islamist god replaces the drive to progress with the patience of resentment. It makes the youth inclined to respect omnipotence (the NSA) and omniscience (Facebook) and the power of politicians, rather than to fight plutocracy, and for progress. After all, the biblical God is, at least symbolically, the ultimate plutocrat: owning everything, knowing everything and ready to use violence and ultimate cruelty to impose her glory and jealousy.

The biblical God is the perfect God for the rule of wealth and evil, and in America, this enormous (mostly) European colony stolen from the Natives, it justifies the very existence of the society: a precious gift.

SUPERSTITIOUS religion tends to make its practitioners believe that, whatever happens to be, was ordained by the organizer of the universe. So it is fundamentally friendly to the powers that be. That is tyrants, dictators, plutocrats… And force, and wealth. So this is what the USA preach.

And another point: China is imminently non-religious. In the last two millennia, China had disastrous experiences with state mandated Confucianism at one point, and state mandated Buddhism, at another. And entire dynasties or states were affected. In the end, the experienced of the state of Qin, first to unify China as the Qin dynasty, in the last three millennia, was that, it was better to depend upon secular law (like its contemporary, the Roman Republic).

Secularism of China goes a long way to explain its spectacular development… By the way, it goes without saying that, should one be a potentate, or a class of potentates anxious to prevent the human development of We The People, a most efficient way to do this is to foster religious superstition. So watch the construction of gigantic mosques and associated buildings in Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey… Algeria, flush with enormous oil and gas revenue, has one of the world’s worst educational level (127th in world rankings… although better than Morocco with 152th… Morocco has only 75% of the phosphate reserves of the world! Such countries do so poorly, because their elites do so well…)

Religion is not just the opium of the people, it is the politics of the soul.

And then, of course, superstitious religions foster a respect for mental ways friendly to losing a grip on reality. When one has no grip whatsoever, one offers oneself to be trampled by the powers that be. It’s hard to imagine carpets happy. Nor can they make their friends as happy as could be, either!

Patrice Ayme

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Note: Karl Marx: “religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself” [The German-French Yearbooks, 1842.] In 1843, Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: ”Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions”….

Thus, for example, US citizens withstand US plutocracy the easier, the more they embrace their belief in the vengeful deity… So it’s a self-feeding, vicious spiral… Fortunately, in Europe, the strong identification of fascism with superstitious religion damaged both (clearly in Spain, Italy, Germany with the SS’ “Gott Mit Uns!”… But even in Marxist fascist countries with living deities such as Stalin, Ceausescu, Tito, etc.)

Islam is founded first on the Qur’an the word of God, as related by Archangel Gabriel to the Messenger, Muhammad. Islam is deeply anti-woman. Don’t insult me, you the ignorant ones: read the Qur’an, or then plenty of quotes from the Qur’an, in context, such as “Islam’s Shame: Lifting the Veil of Tears”. (Astoundingly, Muhammad’s prescriptions for girls and women, was progressive in Seventh Century central Arabia.)

The French Republic (Parliament, Senate, President) banned the integral Niqab (= Burqa, Hijab), on the ground of public safety (face coverings are unlawful in France, except for excellent secular reasons, such as bike riding, skiing, etc.) Islamist organizations went, screaming incoherently, to the French Constitutional Court, which approved the law. Other European countries are following France. Angela Merkel just suggested to ban the niqab.

The Economist, a plutocratic newspaper, plutocratically owned, complete with tax avoidance through Luxembourg, and other tax havens, pontificated that banning the niqab was a “mistake”. I agree that The Economist should say that: if you are a plutocratic entity or person, anything that decreases the rule of Pluto, decreases the plutocracy, and thus is an act adverse to the owners of The Economist, and, thus to the little scribes at The Economist who earn their lives by pleasing their wealthy masters.

Covering Women With Black Junk As If They Were Garbage Is A Terrible Thing, and Message, For Children. It Tells Children A Woman’s Face Is A Terrible Thing, & It Deprives Children From Learning The First Language Of Man, Facial Expression

Not only are faceless women terrible for children. A problem with Islam is that stupid women brought up stupid children, making for stupid adults we now have to try to make intelligent, a hopeless tasks, when the networks and synapses are plain not there…

What is The Economist going to suggest next? That those who want to be treated as slaves in public, chains, whips and al. be allowed to do so? That we conduct public auctions to sell people if some want to take part in these? Just because some people feel so “modest” that they don’t want to be free, anymore

Literal Islam as found in the Qur’an is sexist (women are worth half of men in court, etc.) Aisha, who married the middle age Prophet, when she was just six insisted that the version of the Qur’an which the Third Caliph, Uthman, imposed was sexist, and not at all what her husband, the Messenger of God had said the message of God was. From what we know of the life of Muhammad, she was right (she herself had great freedom, even by contemporary modern standards).

Uthman imposed a Qur’an which was so controversial, a Muslim religious war started, which is still going on, and explains why Islam is divided in 100 Islams keen to kill each other.

Uthman’s Qur’an, the one we have now, is actually full of lethal orders (read the Qur’an or:

Uthman’s Qur’an has to be outlawed, just as the Aztec or the Celtic religions were, and for the same overall reason: calls to murder of various categories of people cannot be tolerated. The god in Uthman’s Quran orders to kill unbelievers, apostates, pagans, homosexuals, those who disagree with “Allah” or his “Messengers”, and, in remote places of the book, even Christians and Jews (the Hadith says all Jews have to be killed so that the Last Judgment can happen).

The calls to murder of Literal Islam are insults and attacks against human ethology (that is, normal human behavior).

Not only the Qur’an says nothing about women being covered like pestilential garbage, but forbidding the showing of human female faces was explicitly forbidden by Muhammad!

Some Hadith clearly state that women must not veil (niqab) their face and hands/ It was taught by the Prophet Muhammad himself to his companion Abu Bakr’s daughter Asma’ bint Abu Bakr:

“O Asma’, when a woman reaches the age of puberty, nothing should be seen of her except for this and this; the hands and the face.” [ Prophet Muhammad, (Narrated by Sunan Abu Dawood]

Another Hadith which forbids (haraam) for women to veil (niqab) their face during Hajj and Umrah that was taught by the Prophet himself in accordance to his Sunnah: “It is forbidden for a woman who is in the state of Ihram to cover her face.”

— Prophet Muhammad, (Narrated by Sahih al-Bukhari)

So why has it become so important for the proponent of today’s Literal Islam? Because veiling the face of women is an attack against human ethology, thus civilization, and advantages the demonic side. Indeed, in normal human behavior, there is little difference between males and females (that’s called low sexual dimorphism).

By pretending that there is a huge difference between human females and males, a religious difference, the partisans of Literal Islam, including The Economist, are asserting that human nature is wrong, and that there is a religious reason for violating said nature.

Let me rephrase this slowly: partisans of Literal Islam are making a religion of violating human nature.

In a way, it makes sense: the dozens of categories of people which the Qur’an orders to murder occur naturally. Paganism, homosexuality, not believing in Islam, or not believing in Islam anymore, and all sorts of religions, some much older than Islam by dozens of centuries, all occur naturally. They are part of what humanity naturally is, or gravitates towards. Literal Islam orders to kill them all: that’s an extreme violation of human ethology. The fundamentals of human ethology are indeed love, care and solidarity (say, against wild beasts).

Murdering other people because of what they believe is not just un-natural to humans, it is an attack against the need, for humans, to think better. To think better, one has to tolerate different beliefs, and one has to tolerate debating these beliefs, that means, one has to tolerate, and even enjoy debate between contradictory beliefs.

However the dictators that Literal Islam enables with its Fascist Principle want to violate human nature. “O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Qur’an’s fascist principle, Sura 4; verse 59)

Civilization is itself a balance act between freedom, human creativity, and the sacrifices and duties that living in cities constrain us to enjoy.

Literal Islam is financed by dictators and plutocrats. They want to violate human nature. But they know they have to start small. So they start by covering women’s faces, as if women had to be modest, ashamed of themselves, and objects of revulsion so great, they have to be hidden.

Covering female faces is a foot in the door, or rather a foot in the face of civilization and the face of woman.

It looks innocent, to the unintelligent, but it is a Trojan horse against humanity.

Literal Islam has rendered what used to be the world’s richest area, the cradle of civilization, into one of the poorest, most conflict laden zones, where civilization goes backwards.

All religions justify a particular self-elected elite’s evil ways. This is why 99.9% of religions are now outlawed. Civilizational progress is pretty much identical with outlawing obsolete systems of thought, including evil religions tied to ways that progress came to consider evil.

And why are so many in the West pushing on us this anti-human, anti-civilizational religion? Precisely because that is what it does: the Main Stream Media in the West are held by plutocrats who fear both civilization, and its bedrock, humanity.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: 1) In other news, Hillary Clinton condemned “Fake News”. That’s amusing, as her and Obama claimed for years, that the companies which profited from TARP reimbursed all of it. Right. But also FAKE NEWS: the companies, mostly banks and their ilk, got much more money, from Quantitative Easing, courtesy of the Federal Reserve, another branch of the government. Those recipients of QE then used QE money to pay TARP. Fake news, yes, and important ones (only me has ever noticed that little detail, it seems…)

2) The South Korean president. Park, was impeached. Daughter of a Korean dictator, she was into Shamanism and corruption. When that came out, her popularity, once towering, collapsed to less than 5%… After the French president Hollande announced he will not be candidate to his succession, and Renzi, the Italian PM, a piece of establishment trash, was thrown out.

The Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, CERN, may have hit the jackpot with its mighty accelerator fed by French nuclear power plants: an apparent new particle, and one NOT predicted by the Standard Model. It could be a Heavy Higgs, or a Graviton…

Notice that the Islamist State has not attacked CERN, yet. However it should, just as a matter of coherence: after all, CERN is trying to define reality better. True Believers know that all the reality there is, is found in the Qur’an. Thus CERN, by exploring, and inventing a different version of reality, is a center of some reality based idolatry obviously adverse to the Qur’an.

Let’s hope CERN has good security (a very small bomb could cause billions of Euros of damage to the Large Hadron Collider, and stop it for years).

Some Of What’s In The Qur’an Can Be Reinterpreted Nicely

As I have tried to explain, Islamism has long been a manipulation which has adversely affected the enfolding of civilization, and that especially in the regions most affected. That Africa and the Middle East have contributed enormously to civilization and can still do so is beyond dispute. Be it only in music: listen to the Touareg group Imahran (the on-going turmoil in Libya is partly about freeing the Touareg). http://www.prospect.zone/imahran-nouveau-venu-sur-la-scene-rock-touareg-partage-les-visuels-de-tahabort/

Meanwhile The Guardian, which censored, as the New York Times does, anything I said vaguely related to Islam, decided to equip itself with a bit of balls and brains. So it published:

Muslims can reinterpret their faith: it’s the best answer to Isis: “Religion must evolve and change – and Islam is no exception. Hardline literalists are undermining the soul of a loving, universal creed.” by Hassan Radwan. (Never mind that the punishment for apostasy is death, no doubt a lasting effect of universal love, as some Saudi youth are discovering anew.)

Not just that, but, after informing me kindly that I was under surveillance, and thinking about it for a little while, The Guardian allowed some comments of mine to be published (which constitute part of what follows). That was a first in months.

Reinterpreting Islam is a solution I have insisted upon, for decades. It is true that most of the people who claim to be the faithful of a given religion have not read the sacred texts they claim to be obeying, and live accordingly. This enables very bad men, or youth, to hijack a religion to their own evil ends, by exploiting the bad quotes they can find, and living accordingly.

A detailed knowledge of history reveals much in the case of the Qur’an. It is not just that the Qur’an was written by people. The Qur’an claims to be the message from God, as transmitted by the Messenger, Muhammad. However, history itself says that this is not so.

The closest people to Muhammad, his wife Aisha and his son in law, Ali, said that the Qur’an we have is not the Qur’an (Recitation) which Muhammad related. Aisha was as explicit as possible about this. She said that the people who knew Muhammad best knew obviously better what he said, than people who barely knew him. In particular she said that the Qur’an that was imposed by Uthman mistreated women (whereas Muhammad was very much for gender equality, and there is overwhelming historical evidence that this is completely true: Muhammad improved considerably the condition of women, and the effect was crucial in helping Islam forge a gigantic empire shortly before and after Muhammad’s unexpected death).

Aisha went to war about this, the atrocious sexism imposed by Uthman’s Qur’an. Unfortunately she lost the “Battle of the Camel” (named from the fact Aisha stood above the battlefield on a camel).

So what happened? The composition of a suitable Qur’an was ordered by the Fourth Caliph, the general Uthman.

Uthman set up a committee to write a Qur’an which suited him. Once that was done, he had all other versions of the Qur’an boiled, throughout the giant Muslim empire.

Thus history shows that the highest (religious) authorities, from the start, contested the validity of the existing Qur’an, that the Qur’an really represented faithfully what the Messenger related. It offers an explicit reason to modify it, by sticking closer to the more plausible version of what Muhammad said (follow Aisha!)

Christianism itself was heavily reinterpreted. The Christianism we tolerate now had all the naughty bits explicitly removed. Such as the Evangels’ Luke 27; 19 which is the predecessor of the Qur’an Sura 5, verse 9. Both verses enjoins to “slay” people who are considered to be “unbelievers“. Obviously, as Christ was ready to slay unbelievers, the Muslim version of God could not do anything else, just to keep up with the Jones (so the violence of the Qur’an partly originates from the violence of Christianism).

The problem with making the Qur’an we have compatible with civilization are very deep. The place of women (or inferior place thereof, what Aisha condemned) is in total contradiction with the United Nations Charter (in law, a woman is half a man, and a man can dissolve or enter marriage pretty much at will, his will; also “battlefield brides” are allowed, and that’s just condoning battlefield rape, as one can observe the Islamist State to practice).

Also the Qur’an is explicitly hostile to democracy (although it encourages charity and equality of all under God). It is actually explicitly friendly to dictators, as long as they are Muslim:

“O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Qur’an’s fascist principle, Sura 4; verse 59). In other words, obey authority as a matter of religion. No wonder that, where the Qur’an rules, so do strongmen.

Saladin and his successors made the literal interpretation of the Qur’an subject to the death penalty. That started before 1200 CE.

In many places of the world, and sometimes very long ago, the fact that the Qur’an was incompatible with civilization was observed and the application of the Qur’an was modified in consequence by supplementary texts and practices. Such currents are often labelled “Sufism”.

In recent decades, the monarchies of the Middle East were able to smother Sufism under their petrodollars, and replace it by the literalism that was expressly made unlawful in Egypt in the Twelfth Century.

By the 1930s, Literalist Islam had nearly disappeared from much of the “Muslim World”. However, the ascent of petro-monarchies after World War Two changed everything. The reason for their financing of Literalism (aka Salafism) was obvious: thus the dictatorships of the Middle East made the world more hospitable, and friendly, to them.

Meanwhile most opinion leaders in the West were too unfamiliar with Islam to understand that, as Abou Diouf of Senegal (ex-president and a Muslim himself) observed, the Islam of West Black Africa was a completely different religion from the Islam of Saudi Arabia. Thus they extended the respect some versions of Sufism richly deserved, to their fanatical antagonist, Literalist Islam.

In other words, Islamophobia is justified in some versions of Islam, and not at all in others. Justice is starting to understand this. In France Jihadist threats and “ordinary Islamism” brought more arrests in three weeks after the Paris attacks than in the rest of the year. 25% of the arrests were of adolescents. 66% resulted in jail condemnations.

This is obviously unsustainable. The solution is to advertise widely what forms of Islamist practices are available, and legal. And also to make Literal Islam explicitly unlawful. As it is, Literal Islam is unlawful only when it explicitly violate democratic law. Thus a great percentage of youth is imprinted on the notion and practices of Literal Islam, while not aware that they contradict the law. And that other versions of Islam exist, which are perfectly compatible with the Human Right Charter.

Meanwhile at CERN, the first team (those can have thousands of PhDs on board) who found the putative new particle said there was one chance out of 93 that this was a fluke. You have to understand that the usual standard is one out 3.5 million. Indeed, so many experiments are made, lots of flukes happen. So why the excitement? Because an independent team, with an independent experiment also found a bump at the same place.

Particles are all about bumps these days. Yet a bump on the road, such as Christianism in the Fourth Century, can be all it takes to send civilization packing.

Why? Because savagery is just below the surface. Humanity’s fate all too often holds just with a hair. Why? Because the savage, better connected as she, or he, is, with his, or her, emotional system, thinks more powerfully, in a sense best connected to war. That’s why Christian fanatics, who were savages, “men in black”, found so easy to go through civilization like a red hot knife through butter.

THE PRESIDENT: ‘Good evening, everybody. I just want to make a few brief comments about the attacks across Paris tonight. Once again, we’ve seen an outrageous attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. This is an attack not just on Paris, it’s an attack not just on the people of France, but this is an attack on all of humanity and the universal values that we share…”We are reminded in this time of tragedy that the bonds of ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ are not only values that the French people care so deeply about, but they are values that we share. And those values are going to endure far beyond any act of terrorism or the hateful vision of those who perpetrated the crimes this evening…

We stand prepared and ready to provide whatever assistance that the government and the people of France need to respond. France is our oldest ally.’

[Other statements by the White House insisted upon the fact that France was the USA’s oldest friend.]

Paris Massacre Observed All Around the World, Including Sydney, San Francisco, Warsaw…

Patrice Ayme’’s Comment: The fact, that France is the USA’s oldest ally, is not pointed out enough. It is not possible to understand France, the USA, Europe, the history of the world, and the genesis of the United Nations and the present world system, without that prominent fact.

The two republics were born completely entangled, through a process which lasted many generations, culminating in the basic constitutions of 1789 (a few weeks apart). Although the French Constitution was clearer (Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite’), the gist of both constitutions was the same. As Obama pointed out, “Liberte’, Egalite’, Fraternite'” is as American as it is French. And it started there, in both places. The men who wrote the American and French constitutions knew each other, which is telling in times when crossing the Atlantic was a dangerous journey which took months.

France can be legitimately seen as the mother of the USA. The war of independence was partly instigated by France, through agents roaming Philadelphia, and then heavily financed to the tune of five trillion 2015 dollars. When told by advisers that he was fostering a republic, Louis XVI brushed it off. Louis himself was busily fighting plutocrats inside France, and wanted to tax them. Taxing the plutocrats in London was a logical continuation of the same effort.

The fascination which North America, the place and continent with its incredible forests and its fascinating Natives, exerted on the French was 250 years old, by the time France fought for an independent America. It’s a curious thing, as France, and especially the French Monarchy, would have profited more by not supporting the rebellion. But many a mother would have profited more, by not giving birth to the child who caused her death. Still, a good mother won’t have it another way, preferring to die for her progeny. Thus the species goes on.

After helping in the various conspiracies that led to the Revolution of 1776, France ramped up its help to the American rebels: most American ammunition was made in France (more than 90%). Later France went in all out war, and, in an unusual feat, even defeat the Royal Navy at Chesapeake Bay. The resulting hopeless siege of Cornwallis forced him to surrender his army to the French commander who politely redirected him to formally surrender to General Washington.

A full generation later, Britain and the USA would again have a war, the war of 1812, at a time when France was also at war with Britain. Then the city of Washington and the White House were burned.

It’s indeed an attack on all of humanity. It’s pretty clear, on reading the entire Qur’an, that Allah’s relationship to humanity is, at best, ambivalent. Allah will, in the end reward those who he is happy with material wealth, but the rest will suffer terrible, unending punishment.

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So what to do?

The UN already has structures, especially the United Nation Security Council (UNSC), to determine what’s terrorism, what’s not, and what to do about it. It legalized the intervention in Libya. The French interventions in Mali, Niger, CAR were also legal according to the UN.

More generally, it is high time to become philosophically coherent. Attacking the Islamist State is excellent, but it leads to madness, when the Islamist State is attacked for exactly the same reasons which are in plain sight in Saudi Arabia, or Qatar. No less an authority as Bachar El Assad just pointed this out with relish. This is completely correct. One cannot feed the Saudis, in particular with weapons, while they fight Shiites in Yemen, massively, and finance Salafism, worldwide, massively.

Similarly, one cannot tolerate Salafist preaching anymore. It is a crime. Potentially the worst crime: mass murdering hate crime. An anti-Semite in the USA was just condemned to death for attacking three Jews in light of his Nazism. As he heard the verdict, he screamed: “Heil Hitler!” In human beings, hatred can know no bounds Not even the survival instinct is a bound for hatred. In the worst cases, the only solution is annihilation. Just as civilization did to Nazism (OK, still a few crumbs to clean here and there).

Nazi engineers, to force their way through the French fortifications above the Meuse river, made kamikaze attack with explosive backpacks. At the Stade de France November 13 2015, three terrorists tried to get in the giant stadium. But security was extreme as the French president was inside, watching the first period of a friendly match France-Germany. They could not get in and had to activate their explosive vests outside the security perimeter (only one civilian died). Our lords are well protected. Yet they don’t have a clue. About the philosophical problem at hand. Not that they used to truly care. Maybe now they will have to.

Oh, by the way, the soccer match between France and Germany was not stopped. The three bombs detonated in the first period, shaking the fortress like stadium. The French president and a German minister were exfiltrated, but the second period proceeded in front of the perplexed spectators and their 80,000 smart phones. France won over the world champions, and the crowd went calmly onto the field, for further instructions. As Obama (implicitly) said, France knows war. For 13 centuries, France was at war with Islam. Peace with Islam, paradoxically happened only in the few decades at the end of the nineteenth century when it occupied Algeria, and a peace treaty had been made with Abdelkader. This is no accident, and a missed occasion, not to say a grave error, but also another story.

OK, it’s rather Muhammad Daily. Al Qaeda took credit for the attack against Charlie Hebdo, in a 12 minute video. Five million copies of Charlie Hebdo are printed and sold. That’s nearly three times that miserable Islamist terrorist aiding and abetting newspaper, the New York Times (I sent a comment to that effect, and they later took down the article I attacked; it quoted criminals approvingly; I did not make a copy in a timely manner).

Another tac of anti-French hypocritical American “intellectuals”: “one does not make fun of minorities”. There are probably more practicing Muslims in France than practicing Christians (let alone Jews). In the world, there is 1.6 billion Muslims. We are talking about operative majorities, here. People get condemned for “Atheism”, or “Insults Against Islam” in Egypt, every week.

As the end of this essay will make clear, that pseudo-holly, PC American “intellectual” position equates to lethal racism against Muslims (the main victims of Islamist violence). So now a few armed fanatics sent, managed, helped and equipped by the unholy alliance of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State make a minority one should not make fun of? According to American philosophers?

What’s the correct approach? The Mayor of Rotterdam a Muslim born in Morocco, son of an Imam, told the Muslim extremists to “rot toch op” (“fuck-off”)

Ahmed Aboutaleb, who arrived in the Netherlands aged 15, spoke out in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris. Mayor Aboutaleb said Muslims who ‘do not like freedom can pack your bags and leave’.

“It is incomprehensible that you can turn against freedom,” he said on the Dutch program “Nieuwsuur (Newshour).” “But if you don’t like freedom, for heaven’s sake, pack your bags and leave… If you do not like it here because some humorists you don’t like are making a newspaper, may I then say you can f– off,” Mr. Aboutaleb added. “Vanish from the Netherlands if you cannot find your place here.”

London Mayor Boris Johnson lauded his Dutch colleague as his “hero,” saying his comments were “straight to the point…. That is the voice of the Enlightenment, of Voltaire,” Mr. Johnson wrote for The Telegraph. He added: “If we are going to win the struggle for the minds of these young people, then that is the kind of voice we need to hear — and it needs above all to be a Muslim voice.”

SATYR INTERVIEWED:

I went to the woods, and met a happy satyr. I talked to him thus: ”What’s up with satire, satyr? Why the happy face? Are you not sad that so many thinkers and cartoonists got killed because they practiced Freedom of Expression?”

The satyr laughed: “You now, I was sad when even Voltaire got censored. But now there are printing 5 million copies of Charlie Hebdo. Maybe they read you too, some day.”

Me: ”You mean, when Voltaire’s play on the Prophet was censored in Europe?”

Satyr: “Exactly, that was the Nadir. Voltaire’s play was entitled: “Le FANATISME Ou MAHOMET Le Prophete“. Yes, the capital letters are in the original. Theater that made people laugh 262 years ago, in 1753, became not “Politically Correct” and got censored in the name of Islamophilia. In the Twentieth-First Century.”

Me: “You exaggerate. Voltaire called it a ‘tragedy’”.

Satyr: “OK, so Islam is fanaticism, according to Voltaire, but fanaticism to that extent, not being able to draw a guy with a beard, that’s funny. We, satyrs and satirists, have been at the core of civilization for 3,000 years! Dionysus, remember? The festivals, the cut-conifers, offering the gifts for the Winter Solstice, the orgies, the drinking, happiness, jokes, the outrages, the craziness, the generalized irreverence? Ah, readers are going to understand that we can’t even f the rophet, only because he is thoroughly decomposed.”

“F the rophet?” I fled in horror, terrified by what American propagandists would call “puerile”. Most Academic American philosophers would condemn me for talking to a Satyr. It’s much better to read the New York Times, which expressed all the racism there was in making cartoons of bearded men, by quoting genuine terrorists calling to kill all those who draw (drawing people is actually forbidden in Islam).

American (paid) philosophers are not amused by Molière’s satirical caricature of religion in Tartuffe, a satire that is exactly 350 years old (and which even the very Catholic Louis XIV liked).

Let’s analyze the latest cover from Charlie Hebdo. A bearded man is crying, he looks sad, dismayed. He wears a cover on his head. He says: ”Je Suis Charlie.” Above it’s written: ”All Is Forgiven.” From this, fanatics, those who come out of the Fanum, the Temple, deduce that Muhammad, somebody dead for nearly 13 centuries, has been gravely “slandered”. Who told them it was that particular person, and how can one insult somebody dead 13 centuries?

Since when is ”All Is Forgiven” a call to hatred? To confuse forgiveness and hatred is a perversion not just of all values, but of vocabulary itself. Since when should serious media quote individuals so inarticulate that they confuse “forgiven” and “hateful”?

Fanatics whose business is extremism of course pounce on the worst interpretations, so that they can advise to augment the nastiness (as it is their business). By taking their delirium seriously, one advertise, and aid and abet the worst aspects, the most demonic side of human beings.

Letting those who call for hatred claim that forgiving is hateful is giving up on reason. There are actually death threats against Jews (among others) in Islam’s most sacred texts. Is this offending material? Is quoting Islam sacred texts unacceptable? Is it what the PC calls “content that is deemed offensive and gratuitous”? Have a look at:

Here is such a well-known Hadith, that it is part of the Charter of Hamas. Book 041, Number 6985:

“Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”

Related by al-Bukhari and Muslim. See also from Sahih Muslim: Hadith: 41:6981, , 41:6982, 41:6983, 41:6984, Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:56:791, and 4:52:177. All this is readily available on Islamist sites. Can one get clearer than that?

Qur’an Sura 2, verse 190: “Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits… Sura2, v.191: And slay them wherever ye catch them… tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter… slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.”

The New York Times actually quoted that verse, S2, v 191. But it quoted exactly what I did not quote: ”Do not transgress limits”. So am I as dishonest as the New York Times? No. “Do not transgress limits” is vague, but innocuous. By quoting that, the New York Times is deliberately distorting the main message of this verse, while claiming they quote what I quote, and it comes out different. It’s always hard to argue with stupidity… By definition of stupidity, which is the inability to understand arguments.

The main message of Sura 2, The Cow, is verse 191. And that is that those who believe in the Qur’an should “…slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.”

If somebody says: ”Hello, good morning, I have to kill you,” Islamophile intellectuals, and the New York Times, will quote: ”Hello, good morning.” Those who want to survive, and who believe in natural goodness, will worry about the rest of the message: I have to kill you, my religion says so.

So who is a disbeliever? The main problem of those who want to survive Islam is exactly here. That’s why millions of Syrians are refugees in other countries, and hundreds of thousands have been killed: who is a disbeliever? When the religious order is to kill “disbelievers”, “disbelief” is the most important question.

Solution? Forget the fiscal deficit imposed by plutophiles in Brussels. The French Republic is at war, and should spend, if need be 5% of its GDP on defense, completely paid out of thin air. And if that brings the Euro down, so much the better. (Actually a currency is defense by other means, so a country with a strong defense has always a strong currency.)

It’s all about power, ladies, gentlemen, and satyrs. And the power starts with the mind.

We all need superstition, because by defining what is “super“, it helps to define the ground we stand on (the mathematical model is sheaf theory: reality id the base space, superstition, the sheaf).

We can teach Santa and a few other things to children, just so they know about lying, even from the most trusted, and that even lying, can have some positive aspects (although transparency is better).

The Santa Claus legend also teaches that there are innocent superstitions and magic… And the Santa Claus legend, or the like, imprints children upon a higher order of things, a just universe rewarding the good. And that point, a superstition, is a good superstition, which helps society, and which is even correct, evolutionary speaking.

Thus some superstitions, have got to be much less welcome. And it teaches to reject appearances, however nice.

To help children discover what is real, we have to teach them what is unreal and even lead them to gently believe, sort of, what is not. Discovering where reality lays, by discovering what is not true is not a science reserved to science. It’s something we discover in childhood. Santa Claus, and his ineluctable dismissal, teaches skepticism, a good thing. Learning the magic of giving and receiving is also a good thing.

This being said, I have not talked much about Santa Claus to my own 5 year old daughter. Why? Because I continually tell her about the many marvelous and magical things of the real world, such as wild life documentaries, or imagined versions of the real world (many cartoons, some of them prize winning Japanese, or movies, some Indian, some Chinese, some Star Wars, etc…)

Nevertheless the 25 centuries old tradition of the Solstice Tree and feast, and the gifts it brings ought to be most respected and important. And it’s also an occasion of learning about the Solstice, that is the heliocentric system and the magical ecliptic.

How do I reconcile my tolerance for Santa Claus with my crackdown on Christianism and Islamism? Well, Santa Claus is not a myth full grown men are supposed to believe in, and go kill people in his name. It’s a myth to grow out of, all the wiser.

Christianism, and Islamism’s moral systems, reduced to the parts compatible with human ethology, are fine with me. Actually I am ready to admire some of their practitioners.

Actually the present Pope just made an excellent blast against the diseases of the Church, which I totally approve. (And said blast can be generalized well beyond the Church.)

The Dark Side is strong, such is its main asset, the ability of doing what is necessary. And if it means using Christianism and Islamism, or the Pope, to advance correct human ethology against plutocracy, that’s all right with me.

The ends certainly justify the means, if they are incommensurate in the right way.

Some have the religion of religions. They worship the idea. The idea of religion. Of course, they have an agenda; it could be Tibetan Buddhism (with its demons), or the Christo-Islamist god, who absolutely needs a fig leaf. And the name of that fig leaf was Satan (or Shatan, namely Hades, Pluto, or Ba’al, refurbished, with a fresh Dark Side coat).

There is a funny passage in the Qur’an where Allah (Arabic word for the Christo-Islamist Jewish god) warns about asking him questions about his business with Shatan and Djinns. He hints darkly that those who ask too many question will end in the fire (where they will be burned until their skin falls off; then their skin will grow back, and they will be thrown in the fire again; apparently the Qur’an anticipated stem cell treatments yet to come!)

There are religions, and religions. Generally, when talking to some primitive about religion, she or he assumes, naturally, that one talks about her, or his religion. But maybe 10,000 religions are known. 99.99% of them grossly violate human rights, and are criminal systems of thoughts and mood. Once again, that’s no accident: religion is all about plutocracy, and plutocracy all about the demonic side of man.

When religious people talk about “religion”, and request respect, they don’t mean that we should respect the Aztecs’ religion: they never heard of it. Or, if they did, they don’t realize what it means.

Religion’s idea comes from the Latin “religio”, itself contained in re-ligare: to bind together again. We The People, bound again together. To what? To whom? To us again?

Religions basically come under two variants: those which bind to rationality, and those which bind to irrationality, that is, to madness.

By “madness” here, I mean any altered state of consciousness. I am a mountaineer and a mountain runner. I have run very long, say in Iran, at 10,000 feet, in a one way solitary run I had to complete to save myself. The heat was great, blood was seeping through my running shoes. I felt nothing. This sort of altered state of consciousness, evolution given stoicism, is routine for tough mountain climbers, who are familiar with slipping out of cracks from blood seeping out of their bodies, while keeping a happy smirk on their faces.

Why would one bind to rationality? Because, without rationality, there is no survival. Homo has been mostly selected for increasing rational performance over the last 5 million years.

Civilization blossomed this in the idea of democracy. The republic is the fundamental religion, as it effectively was for the Romans, for centuries (in co-existence with superstitious cults, such as the original Roman one).

Why would one bind to irrationality? Because, once We The People has become irrational, in other words, dumb, it can easily be manipulated into subservience.

Hence superstition. “Superstitio” was used derisively by the Christians against Pagans as early as the Fourth Century. However, the concept is “what stands above”… the world. In other words, what cannot be objective.

Superstitious religions are there to terrify people, and force them into abject subjugation, so they all have demons, as the Punic religion did, or the Aztecs.

The Aztecs, thanks to tearing the hearts of their live prisoners out, had kept the nations around them in a state of fear of these “flower wars”.

Just as Islam is about peace, Christianity about love, the Aztecs’ gods were about… flowers. (Once, to inaugurate the greatest temple so far, they tore 80,000 hearts out, in five days, a remarkable pre-industrial feat.)

The Aztecs were horrified by the torture of the Christians. As far as they were concerned, Christianity was a torture religion, perfectly symbolized by the torture instrument the Christians brandished, the cross. Christians will be surprised to learn this. Of course. Gods, imagination, and machinations go very well together.

Christian minds have been well engineered together into the herd instinct.

Terrified people obey their masters well. And if that is not enough, the Christians, later imitated by the Muslims, would exert what (“Saint”) Augustine referred approvingly as “great violence”. By the time Augustine recommended “great violence”, the executions of those-who-had-chosen (= “heretics”) were routine.

This is how the Christians took an empire which was mostly Pagan and Neo-Platonic by storm: by killing millions. And this is also why, ever since, they speak of the persecutions they suffered before that: because the later were relatively puny: only 6 Christians were executed under Marcus Aurelius. Some emperors may have been closet Christians, well before Galerius executed 3,000 Christians, in the worst persecution, around 306 CE (which he rescinded later)..

Christianity and its parrot, Islam, have killed tens of millions, in their names.

Now they don’t want their names to be their names, a bit like homosexuals don’t want to not be called gays, otherwise they would be rather sad.

That’s why their sacred texts enshrine the power of ultimate violence, when they do not call to exert it, outright. That’s why they are, under the guise of fearing them, a cult of demons.

The Cathars said nothing else. So the Christians exterminated them, millions of them, down to the last one. And also all those who lived in the same cities, just to make sure:

“Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”: kill them all, God will recognize his own, the commander of the Crusade is alleged to have ordered. This most ferocious of all Crusades happened on French soil. Don’t expect the masters to remember that. Although not respected as much as Islamism, Christianism is still up there in the pantheon of values in the West (go ask people what they think of Saint Louis or Luther: they will express reverence for these master thinkers of Hitler.)

Superstitions such as Christianism and Islamism, who include divinely mighty demons are demoniac, it’s a fact. And that’s why Allah does not want to talk about it, lest we ponder his bloody hand, and the company he keeps.

We have seen demons. They helped the Caliphs kill those who did not believe. They helped emperors love the church demoniacally.

You don’t want demons? Bring back reason.

But not any reason. Before he decided to invade Ukraine, Putin’s approval rating was 65%. Now it’s 86%: Russia has become mad with war frenzy. One of the reasons why religions full of demons are popular, is that demonic behavior itself is popular: people with nothing better to do, will get on the warpath. Not just for the spoils (material riches, eternal life) but also because that’s the way people are.

All the way to viewing irrationality as a right. Right as a vacation from the human condition.

Patrice Ayme’

***

Note about history and philosophy: Many problems more or less scientifically solved recently have their roots in Ancient Philosophy, which first brandished them. An example is the incompleteness theorems in logic (they grew from the Cretan Liar paradox, as I have explained in the past). Zeno’s paradox is another. Or even Archimedes’ infinitesimal method.

I could make here a digression in physics. Physics, ultimately, is about history. The lab tests what has been determined, historically, as important. Roughly all of the physics system of thought, articulated around equations, superficially observed, is actually historical: even the axioms of Quantum physics have their ultimate justification in history, not experimentation as all too many naïve physicists… believe. Yes, believe, as a Jihadist believes: closing one’s mind is not the exclusive province of superstitious fanatics.

Tribes is where the power lays, and not just in the Middle East. Those who are viewed as brandishing the right ideas climb up the hierarchy of power.